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Wireless System Could Offer a Private Fast Lane

Steve Perlman, the inventor and entrepreneur behind the Artemis pCell technology, demonstrated his system by delivering different high-definition video streams to eight iPhones simultaneously.Credit
Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — In a spacious loft across the street from the Bay Bridge, Steve Perlman did something last week that would ordinarily bring a cellular network to its knees.

Around him was a collection of eight iPhones, a pair of television sets with superhigh-resolution 4K displays and an arsenal of other devices. Mr. Perlman played high-definition movies from Netflix on a half-dozen or so devices at once, wirelessly transmitting all the video to them. Instead of stumbling under the strain of so much data jamming the airwaves at once, the video played on all the screens with nary a stutter.

The demonstration showed off a technology that Mr. Perlman, a serial entrepreneur and inventor who sold WebTV to Microsoft for more than $500 million in the late 1990s, contends will give mobile users far faster cellular network speeds, with fewer dropped phone calls and other annoyances, even in stadiums and other places where thousands of people use mobile phones at the same time.

“This is as big a change to wireless as tubes-to-transistor was to electronics,” Mr. Perlman said recently.

Watching movies, TVshows and other clips on the go is catching on in a big way, as mobile devices with bigger, sharper screens become popular and more video is available online.

But because of the increasing demand, cellular networks are regularly overloaded. In the United States last year, the average mobile phone user consumed 1.2 gigabytes of data a month over cellular networks, nearly double the average amount in 2012, Chetan Sharma, a consultant for wireless carriers, estimated. In a recent report on mobile data trends, Cisco, the networking equipment maker, said mobile video accounted for 53 percent of all mobile data by the end of 2013, after surpassing 50 percent for the first time in 2012.

That leaves wireless carriers scrambling for ways to make sure all that video does not clog their networks. Late last year, executives at Verizon conceded that data speeds on its wireless network were beginning to suffer from a jam of new mobile devices using the latest LTE networking technology, especially in tech-saturated cities like New York and San Francisco.

Verizon is adding more antennas to its network, forming smaller wireless cells with stronger coverage and rolling out service on new segments of the wireless spectrum, the digital equivalent of opening new lanes for traffic. Sprint is introducing a service called Sprint Spark that increases access speeds if customers have devices that can use multiple wireless frequencies at once.

Photo

The housing for the Artemis pWave antenna, part of a proposed method of delivering high-speed mobile data.Credit
Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

If pCell works as promised, Mr. Perlman’s technology could result in much bigger gains in wireless speeds. In traditional cellular networks, antennas placed around a city transmit wireless signals to all of the mobile devices within their area. As more people enter an area, they share the wireless network with everyone else there, resulting in slower speeds. Wireless carriers cannot simply solve the problem by putting antennas everywhere because their signals can be disrupted if they are too close together.

With a network of pCell antennas, someone with a mobile device will get access to the full wireless data speed in the area, regardless of how many other people are sharing that network, Mr. Perlman said. His system does this by embracing the interference caused by nearby antennas, rather than avoiding it. Behind the scenes, data centers connected to the antennas perform fast mathematical calculations to create a unique and coherent wireless signal for every person on the network (the “p” in pCell stands for personal).

Video

PCell Demo

“I don’t think there’s any other system out there doing anything like this,” said Pieter van Rooyen, an electrical engineer and former academic who has founded wireless start-ups. Mr. van Rooyen, now the chief executive of a genomic start-up, has known Mr. Perlman for 10 years and is an informal adviser to him.

Mr. Perlman began working on the technology more than a decade ago through the Rearden Companies, an incubator Mr. Perlman formed in San Francisco that has spawned an eclectic mix of start-ups, some of which have not been commercial successes despite innovative products. He left his last start-up, OnLive, a cloud game service, after it struggled to get rights for games from publishers. The service still operates.

He began talking about the technology, then called DIDO, for distributed input distributed output, in 2011 when it was essentially a science experiment. With help from a small team, it has advanced to where he is ready to introduce it commercially with one or more partners.

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Mr. Perlman has formed a start-up that he plans to announce on Wednesday, Artemis Networks, to bring the technology to market, with the first deployment planned for late 2014.

His team got pCell working with available LTE handsets, including the latest iPhones and Samsung smartphones, so that people would not need to buy new devices if their carrier uses his technology. He will conduct a public demonstration of it at Columbia University, his alma mater, on Wednesday afternoon.

Because he has described the technology only in broad terms and very few people have been able to evaluate it firsthand, some doubt that Mr. Perlman’s technology will perform as he says. Steven Crowley, a wireless engineer who mostly consults with carriers outside the United States, said that several performance claims Mr. Perlman outlined in a paper on the technology “seem difficult to achieve in practice.”

But he did not suggest whether Verizon would adopt pCell, and it is possible that all the big carriers could shun Mr. Perlman’s technology. John Sculley, a former chief executive of Apple who has invested in wireless start-ups, including Metro PCS, said a newcomer to the wireless business could build an ultrafast network using Artemis’s technology for far less money than a traditional cellular network, partly because there is more flexibility about where its antennas can be placed.

“This is one of those rare things that happens in Silicon Valley every 20 or 30 years,” said Mr. Sculley, who is an adviser to Mr. Perlman, whom he has known since Mr. Perlman worked at Apple in the 1980s. “It has the potential to change the whole cast of players of the wireless telecommunications industry.”

A version of this article appears in print on February 19, 2014, on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Wireless System Could Offer a Private Fast Lane. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe